A Conversation with Pastor Tim Keller about Hope in Times in Fear

hello this is russell moore and you're listening to signposts and here on signposts i invite you every time to pull up a chair and to listen as i talk to thinkers and leaders about a whole range of issues always looking for what to walker percy used to call signposts in a strange land and i'm really really honored to have my friend tim keller on today to talk about his new book called hope in times of fear the resurrection and the meaning of easter tim thanks for being on signpost today wow it's an honor to be here thanks i was uh finishing your book last night and as i was doing so i was thinking about the um the article that you wrote for the atlantic a couple of weeks ago that really resonated with a lot of people uh talking about sort of the things that you learned as you were being treated for cancer and one of the things that really struck me the most in that in that article and it showed up many times in this book as well is how you you learned through this time that you could find much more joy if you didn't try to make a heaven out of the things that that could bring joy could could you explain a little bit about what what you meant by that well yes i can i'll do it existentially um and then also uh maybe a little theologically it basically my wife and i kathy and i recognize the fact that we we set our we rested so much of our joy in uh pretty material things and they were fairly different i tended to uh in some ways we were a little bit a little bit like gender stereotypes here we played into the gender stereotypes a little bit i was uh i really did rest in uh ministry uh accomplishments maybe a better word would be uh uh certain certain certain thing new institutions getting started new organizations new i'm a starter i like that and i would just find that that's what made life meaningful my wife actually found a lot of uh different places we lived uh there were certain places we especially as we got older we went to for certain weeks of every year that were extraordinarily important to her and also certain aspects of the actual physical environment we were in sights and sounds and things that we could do and we realized that when the when the cancer diagnosis came that uh these things were take being taken away from us not only on my side uh i can read and write and do things and i can actually talk on podcasts like this but it's not the same thing as starting a church or starting i can't i can't do those things in a way and i shouldn't actually now kathy also realized that we had to sort of die to the possibility of ever going to some of the places that we have gone to every year for many years and a place where she would get respite where she would feel like she was getting her her soul renewed and we realized it was not god it was god's gifts that we were really looking to and that when you make when you try to make god's gifts into god you actually don't get as much out of them we realize in some ways we were never really satisfied by them and when we we said we died all that last summer when we first heard about the cancer we sort of died to that we we said we may never see these things again and we started to go really after after god in prayer we came to realize we actually did enjoy what we were getting uh a lovely day we i do see water here in other words there's many things about where we live there lovely and we realized we were enjoying life more than we had before now what theologically what augustine means by that is you reorder your loves and what augustine would say contrary to the buddhist or the stoic which says you detach your heart from these things so they won't hurt you when you lose them uh or the modern person who says you go out and you you know you only go around once in life so you grab for all the gusto you can remember that beer commercial are you old enough to remember that beer but what augustine would say is you don't want to love anything here less because these are god's good gifts you don't want to harden your heart or detach your heart from them but your problem is you you you need to love god more in relation to them and if you do that then if you love first things first you'll love second things second third things third if you if you love second things first or third things first you actually uh lose them they don't give you what you want so we were in a way talking about something very old is something that augustine talked about in the confessions 1500 years ago uh and uh but i was able to turn it into an atlantic article basically how do you think that i i suppose there are probably many people who haven't yet grappled with mortality but who might wonder how do i know if i'm putting second things first how do i compare love for god which often seems sort of unquantifiable and intangible with my loves for these secondary things okay it's a great question i would say uh that if you even ask that question you are making progress if you even doubt yourself here make progress but i do think the reality is that uh there are some progress that you don't make until something goes wrong in your life there's some of it you can do without trouble and difficulty uh so for example i can uh uh if i'm making an idle out of my career can i really de-i deidolize it without something going wrong in my career can i can i actually say i'm working too hard i'm too driven and maybe you see some other friend of yours life blow up perhaps over the same thing and you say i don't want to go there i see what he did you know he started to lie he started to do things because there was it was more important that he be successful than he'd be honest or be virtuous i don't want to do that i'm afraid of that so is it possible for you to actually de-idolize your career without there being some big problem in your career maybe give it a shot because if it's not sufficient god will give you some problem that will force it on you so well when when you face those times of sort of forcing it whether it's mortality or or something else what about regrets often people will talk about looking back and seeing regrets and i'm not talking about sins here i'm just talking about um in terms of say ministry accomplishments you look back and you say i wish i had done this or i wish i had not done that do you think that an experience like this clarifies those regrets in a way that it heightens them or does it does it for you anyway put them into perspective oh that's a great question um i think certainly the perspective help i mean i think i think what i get from c.s lewis and tolkien and people like that is that uh heaven will make amends for all that in other words there will be no regrets when you get there uh it'll be um or another way to put it is anything that you were actually trying to accomplish or or reach in this life is is just an echo of what you're going to get in heaven you're going to eat it and drink it and it'll be there so any there in a sense there should be no regrets because anything you were hoping to to attain you will attain nevertheless it's actually a good i mean i kathy and i both look back we actually experienced quite a bit of regrets in the situation where in light of our mortality which finally hit us we look back and see all the the opportunities and things that we didn't make use of now you re you you um console yourself with what i just said that you that heavens will make amends for everything and uh and anything that you didn't accomplish well in god's plan and all things were together for good to those who love god and are called according to his purpose and god's plan that wasn't something that was part of his plan for human history uh but in the end everything's gonna be made right everything's gonna be made right i mean i'll give you a quick example is that i've i'll i'll be real real uh granular here is that i see other people people my age and people i know pretty well who have been much better at mentoring a younger generation of leaders than me and i realized here's my excuse i realized the ministry that i was running here we got so big that i really it took everything i could i mean had you know i don't know 100 full-time people reporting up to you and that when your institutions get that big you spend so much of your time uh running the institution so actually if just example somebody like mark dever maybe i shouldn't be mentioning calling out names you know mark has almost deliberately kept their church because it hasn't gone to multiple services and videos and all that i don't know whether he had the foresight to do this but he's just basically kept the church kind of the size it's been for a long time which may enables him to put an enormous amount of of capital and time over the years into raising up other leaders and putting him out there and he's uh is a far more far better at that than i ever was and because my church got bigger so you look back and you say okay on the other hand uh out of redeemers spun all kinds of things a city to city uh which is a church planting network around the world has worked in now thousands of churches around the world there would be no city of city if redeemer hadn't gotten big there would be no hope for new york there would be no redeemer counseling services there would be no you know there's there's all these things that have happened and so you look back and say god he knoweth and yet there are times where both kathy and i look back quite a bit and say in light of eternity there won't be regrets but right now we have quite a few um you you mentioned in the book uh subtitle uh fear or well in the actual title hope in times of fear and i was i was kind of surprised when i linked to your atlantic piece in my newsletter i was hearing back from a lot of people for whom it it sort of hit home who were in their early 20s and people that you would think wouldn't ordinarily be thinking about long perspective sorts of of things now but i wonder if this year of covid has not to some degree forced everyone to grapple with uh mortality and shortness of life and and so forth and with with fear and i wonder what you would say uh hebrews 2 says that we've been freed from captivity to fear of death and yet we're all afraid of death we're not in slavery to fear of death the bible says but why would those of us who who know christ who follow christ still have this sense of fear when we're thinking about death oh well okay there's two two levels to answer your question uh the first level is i'll talk about the christians in a second i think the first level is the pandemic was a little bit like it broke through the denial yeah i mean i i i'll get to you in one second i'm going to say all people see basically live in denial of their mortality uh in in by the way i quoted john calvin in the uh in the article which in atlantic which hasn't happened recently in the atlantic i'm sure where he actually says when you see a dead body you philosophize about mortality but then you go off and you basically believe in your own perpetuity you know in his little section in the institutes where he talks about you know he has got a section on which has been pulled out and it's called the little book on the christian life uh and uh calvin actually says that meditating on your future mortality is extremely important and that that we're all living in denial and as a result we make bad choices we we don't turn to god in the right way we actually make bad life choices it's very very interesting i think the pandemic in a way was a cultural moment in which people said wait a minute all those dystopian movies where a plague comes and wipes out a third of the country of the world or where somebody hacks the into the uh infrastructure somehow and all the you know there's a there's a complete depression because the bank all the banking uh system around the world collapses and nobody knows what anybody's worth or somebody sets off a dirty bomb and destroys half of a country and uh wait a minute those things can actually happen because actually the pandemic is a very as you know it's a very close shave this is nothing compared to what could happen and we really aren't in a very good position to say oh well okay we've got things set up so this isn't going to happen again nobody's saying that uh and so the i think in a way for the whole world especially younger people there's been a cultural um uh shattering of your denial about our mortality as a human race as a civilization that is very similar to what happens when you're told on may 14 2020 you know what you have pancreatic cancer in most pancreatic cancer people die within a year and a year and a half once they're diagnosed it's the same thing so that's why i said you can you can uh talking at two levels about why the pandemic uh has created a basically an attitude of fear in general out there yeah yeah and and why i think a lot of christians when they do come up against that sense of fear wonder does this mean that i'm inadequate in faith shouldn't i if i know that to be absent from the body is to be present with the lord shouldn't i have this sense of rushing rushing onward toward heaven without this sense of trepidation sure you should by the way if you were if you act believed with all your heart everything you profess with your mouth in your head you'd be perfect just keep that in mind otherwise if i if i fully trusted in jesus why would what i always thought was fascinating about martin luther's uh exposition of the ten commandments luther says you never break commandments two through ten without first breaking commandment one what he means is he says you would not ever lie unless you were making something a more of a god than jesus at the moment so i lie because oh you know what if i lie here i can make a million dollars okay well then money is your true god your true security your true success and that means you're breaking commandment one which is have no other gods before me um and the reason you break commandment one all the time is because the act the fact is the love of god is not as real to my heart and it's not as real my faith is is weak my the love of god is not as real to my heart as the love of popularity or the love of being considered a successful person and so if i really did believe the things i profess that i'm going to die and that i'm going to go be resurrected and that jesus love is what matters and all that i'd be perfect and you'd be perfect he would never sin you would have any reason to sin so yeah of course of course you should i also said of course you should you should you should believe this but we don't and that god continues to work with uh very broken people and people that need grace every day every minute every second i think about um often i don't know if you've ever said this or written this anywhere publicly but in the book club that we're in one night you happen to mention about um i think we were talking about ecclesiastes and you said if all that we had uh was ecclesiastes we would be tempted to just a sort of nihilism nothing matters uh and if all that we had were proverbs we would be tempted to almost a prosperity gospel i can i can do it if i just do these things i get these results but you need the interplay between the two that god in his wisdom put both of these words in the canon and they inform one another i wonder if the same thing is true in terms of our sense of mortality if if we had a sense only that life is a vapor we might think nothing really matters that i do and if all that we had is redeem the day redeem the time we might think this is all that matters is what i'm i'm doing right now but we have to sort of hold those things in tension do you think i'm on the right path there with that or yeah yeah not only are you on the right path and that by the way that idea from the old testament came from my friend tremper longman who you know he's an old testament professor who actually said that the canon was put together by god so that we would have these balancing acts but in the new testament the balance comes between between the which is a big part of my book by the way is that when jesus rose from the dead he brought the future kingdom into the present partially but not fully and i think that already but not yet that we are we are redeemed but we're not fully redeemed that we uh that that we should not be cynical and think that we can't see great things happening but at the same time we shouldn't be uh naive and utopian and so i think that that balance what you're talking about is not only in the new testament but it's it's right in the center of the new testament because uh the kingdom of god is already but not yet one of the things you emphasize in the book is that by resurrection you're not talking about metaphor this isn't wellness it isn't sort of the the cycles of renewal in nature but bodily historical resurrection from the dead you interact with nt rights great the resurrection of the son of god a book a little bit at the beginning and i'm i'm wondering if you're talking to a skeptic to someone who's an unbeliever who doesn't accept the claims of christianity would you start there with the historical reality of the resurrection and and worked outward or would you make that decision sort of case by case as you're talking to the to the person yeah the second um it really it depends the skepticism uh you know like i was just talking to my uh my sister who's got a uh grandson who's i guess 16 17 who's starting to go into skepticism but his mother just died last year and so he's talking a lot about the resurrection can't really happen he's talking to his his grandmother uh my gran and my sister is a christian he's trying to say oh you know what the resurrections just can't happen so now should i i mean not this is a pretty rush this is a pretty obvious example no i don't think you give this this guy yeah you don't you you don't go after him too much on the intellectual side you you do some work but you also realize his mom died last year and he's he's having real questions about those things and so i do think you have to be careful uh if i see somebody who's just pretty pretty confident it does look like the skepticism is a is pretty much just intellectual mostly uh that they've been around a lot of smart skeptics but they haven't been around a lot of smart believers and it doesn't look like their their skepticism being fueled by abuse in the past or bad church experiences and things like that i would probably yes i would go i think the resurrection is especially in light of not only tom wright but other people there's an awful lot of interesting stuff to give thoughtful folks right now so if the person seems to be kind of fair-minded and not being driven in their doubts by other things yes i would go there you mentioned the already not yet tension and one of the things that you said in the book is explaining what regeneration is as a fundamental um i'm trying to think of how you worded it a radical reorientation of life and one of the things that i've sort of noticed anecdotally at the beginning of my ministry i think i met more people who were skeptical of the possibility of regeneration because they couldn't believe in the resurrection and now i tend to meet more people who are the reverse they have trouble believing in the resurrection of jesus because they've lost faith that regeneration could be true for some of the reasons that you mentioned a few minutes ago they've seen institutions fail that they trusted they've seen people uh that they they they really trusted as spiritual leaders uh fall and then they look at themselves and they say how how do i have newness of life when i'm i i seem to be so unchanged um what word would you have to someone who's having difficulty there well that's good i mean there's no doubt that um um russ i would always say to people that faith is a mixture of reason and experience that uh i say for example if uh if somebody what let's say i'm hiring an assistant and uh i about mainly the way i hire somebody is i interview them i look at their references i see what everybody else is saying about them and there's a sense in which my decision to choose candidate b over a and c is pretty rational it's basically but but it's mainly a probability frankly yeah it's it's like saying well it's likely that this is the right person but then i actually have to i have to actually have faith uh enough to hire the person and then in a year or two if the person really works out then i'm actually totally sure this was the right person so i have an experience it takes a kind of risk of course and a commitment now tom wright actually says that that outside of things you can you can approve in a laboratory you know like you know compound a boils it at this temperature at this you know uh you know barometric pressure and that kind of thing is apart from that we really can't prove anything we can't prove that anything in history at all if you want to talk about proof like that but he says when it comes to the resurrection there are there's there's tons of great evidence as much evidence to believe in it as any other historical event but then he would agree that it's it's putting your faith in it and going to jesus christ on the basis of it that creates that commitment and experience where you go from uh yeah i think this i really think there's really good reasons to believe this too i know it's true i just absolutely that's true and and so i do think that when people um are finding that their experience of the resurrected life is not very strong in them uh but in a way russ when i was told i had pancreatic cancer i would say i did feel a certain wavering in my faith why wouldn't i and at that point i did go back to the to the um sorry about that uh i did go back to the um uh you might say the rational and reread a lot of what tom wright said and it was hugely helpful so i guess i would say you know if the existential is flagging a little bit sure up the rational uh if the rational doesn't take you all the way there it can't right take up the existential but i i really do want to say by the way i want to say um and i have done this i've had people say to me that uh i i've walked away from christianity because i had this very i had these you know i was going to this church and i found out that that the uh the pastor who i really looked up to was having an affair and was a total hypocrite and was abusive and i just walked away and i said look i don't want to be i you know i have to be careful here as long as if the person himself or herself was a victim of abuse then i wouldn't say this but the person was just disillusioned i would say okay let me ask you a question does that person's adultery mean that jesus christ couldn't have been raised from the dead and they'll say well no i said no of course not i mean in other words it's that's a non-sequitur to say well because my pastor was a hypocrite jesus could have been raised from the dead the reasons for jesus being raised in the dead are not ultimately you know the uh the quality of life of every one of his followers and i said i said you you really do have to go and ask yourself the question why was i a christian or why did i go to that church no did i say did you do the hard work of thinking these things out or were you just taken up with the social you know the social community and that sort of thing so i think you have to go back and forth and it depends again like i'm glad you're pointing this out case by case when we're talking about fear uh one of the things that comes of course is just cultural uh sorts of fear and um i'm sure you saw yesterday gallup released a survey showing that for the first time in their recorded polling um church membership is less than 50 percent uh of the american public church or any any house of worship membership down to 47 percent and that's a dramatic fall over over 20 years uh it seems things seem to be kind of cracking apart uh for a lot of uh christians when they're when they're looking at this um if you if you had to predict uh sort of where this is going in terms of secularization and what is the church in america going to look like say 20 years from now of course you you're not psychic we know that but what would you what would you guess ah okay i would say now you know what i i really feel like you you need to get ross douthitt or somebody like that on to talk about the future of the catholic church i just don't feel like i can speak to that and they are a pretty major part yeah you know when we talk about christianity in america sorry they are um you know they're they're a big they're a big piece of it but when it comes to protestantism here's what i think is going to happen over the next 20 or 30 years first of all uh the number of uh nominal believers that is people who believe and are part of churches mainly through cultural and social pressure or benefit which is how an awful lot of people in this country have been part of the the church in other words it was either social pressure or social benefit to just being part of the church or or family tradition what happens is more nominal believers they they are being shed and we're going to get down to people who uh basically the religion is not inherited but chosen and it's thought out now when you get down to that group that you can have attrition there too but they don't they they attrition there's much more retention so a kind of a nominal methodist who uh family who goes to the methodist church every so often and they're historically methodists but nobody's really all that strong in their beliefs uh the idea that their children would grow up and say i'm not methodist i'm not a christian that's the chance of that are very high so the retention rate of a nominal is not very high the retention rate of more conservative and orthodox of their children is way way way higher so first of all you're going to shrink secondly not white people are far more secular and individualistic than non-white people non-white people are more religious and they're more communitarian or communal and uh non-white people's birth rates are lower they uh immigration is going to come in and you're going to see i think a shrinking of the church down to what i don't know where it's going to be it could be down to like 20 to 30 percent and then it'll start to grow again and it'll be far more multi-ethnic and it'll be far more orthodox so it when i was growing up there was a kind of uh evangelical conservative sliver the majority of people who went to church were mainline protestant that mainline protestant will be the sliver and the majority of people will be evangelical or pentecostal or something like that and it'll be at least more than half non-white my guess is if the population is um say 50 white 20 years from now or 45 white the church will be more like 60 or 70 percent non-white and 30 white that's like it is in new york if you come to new york we've been planting churches i mean literally the the evangelical church in new york city has grown from about 100 churches to over 250 churches in the center part in the last 25 years which is amazing but probably no more than a third of the people in those churches are white so i i my guess is that what i'm seeing in new york will be the the future here you'll shrink down you're not going to see 75 50 church membership or church attendance and that sort of thing but it'll get down to like it'll get down to 25 to 35 percent it'll be largely it'll start growing again uh secularization will actually bottom out in about 20 or 30 years um islam will grow here too so because for for a lot of reasons i don't know if that if you find that interesting but not to this inevitable sense of secular secularizing everything the future is disenchanted you don't accept that at all no no no as a matter of fact i mean all that ask anybody and demographics the world is actually going to get less secular as time goes on a lot of that has to do with birth rate and things like that but uh but also evangelism you know and uh that sort of thing before i let you go i know i've kept you longer than i said i would but uh if if you were going to give a word to i mentioned a few minutes ago how surprised i was at all the 21 22 year olds who really resonated with with the atlantic article if you had to give a word of advice to that 22 year old christian who's a little scared a little nervous uh about the future and he said here's one thing you should really concentrate on as you go forward uh what would you what would you advise hmm well you know what i've all this entire podcast i've sort of dodged all of your questions by saying case by case i don't know if i can quite do that on this one um well okay let me just say something that kathy and i have talked to each other about in the last year if jesus christ was actually raised from the dead if he really got up walked out was seen by hundreds of people talk to them if he was raised in the dead then you know what everything's going to be all right whatever you're worried about right now whatever you're afraid of everything is actually going to be okay because because you got to remember we're not just talking about resurrected people jesus christ is and this is where christianity is unique we're talking about a resurrected world meaning other there's plenty of other religions that talk about a future afterlife which is a non-material world in other words you get a consolation for the world we've lost christianity says it's not just your bodies are being resurrected but the the world is actually going to be a material world that's cleansed from all evil and suffering and uh and sin and if jesus christ was raised from the dead then the whole world is going to be in a sense resurrected and everything is going to be okay everything you don't even you don't know how i don't know how but it will be so uh and you know what actually it would right now i couldn't possibly be convinced that jesus was not raised from the dead either intellectually or existentially so whenever i'm by the way but kathy and i listen we cry we cried a lot last night sometimes the reality of the shortness of what we have left here just overwhelms us and we were just weeping together and and crying and then you say if jesus christ is raised in the dead it is going to be okay and then you can wipe your tears but you don't stop crying uh it's like salt in the wound that keeps the wound from going bad uh that keeps them from getting infected but it doesn't mean that until the end of you know until we actually meet jesus christ we still have our wounds so they aren't going to be healed but they'll be healed by his so i think i still could yeah i would still go back to if jesus christ was racially dead and he was you're going to be okay well that's a that's a good word on which to end uh the book is called hope in times of fear by tim keller and i don't want to sound like a pentecostal tv evangelist but um i think despite the fact that your book and article deal a lot with mortality i think you're going to be with us for many years by god's good kindness and we need that i'm really thankful for you tim and for the way that god uses you in my life and i encourage everybody to to read this book in a time of fear thanks burp for being with us today it was great to be with you russ and i would encourage you if you would like more information on this book or other resources just tap the cover art here or swipe it up and there will be some show notes on that and be sure also to send me your ethical questions that you're grappling with maybe something in your family your church uh and we'll deal with it over on the solo podcast and also be sure to send this along to someone you think would benefit from it this is russell moore and you're listening to signposts

Channel: Russell Moore

Views: 20,559

Rating: 4.8247013 out of 5

Keywords: Tim Keller, Timothy Keller

Id: fuCusQ3Y6HY

Length: 36min 14sec (2174 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021